Be Kind, Rewind: The Disappeared Video Rental Stores of Rockford, Illinois

By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

There was a time when Friday night in Rockford, Illinois, meant going to the video store. Before Netflix, before streaming, before virtually every movie ever made seemed to be available at the push of a button, there was a ritual involved in finding something to watch. You got in your car, drove to your favorite rental store, wandered the aisles looking at movie boxes, and hoped to come home with something worth watching. Sometimes you did. Sometimes you didn't. But the trip itself was part of the entertainment.

For those of us who came of age during the 1980s and 1990s, video rental stores were as familiar a part of Rockford's commercial landscape as grocery stores, record shops, and neighborhood taverns. There were local chains, independent operators, national franchises, and even video rental counters inside supermarkets. Each had its own selection, atmosphere, and regular customers. And almost all of them have disappeared, leaving behind storefronts occupied by other businesses and memories that are becoming increasingly difficult to document.

I was attending Rockford College around 1993 when I frequented a video store near campus that I remember as Cinema Centre Video. For years I associated the store with the Morsay Drive area, although a surviving business directory lists Cinema Centre Video at 2213 East State Street, with Dennis Sharp identified as its owner. Whether the business moved, had another location, or my memory has simply rearranged the geography after three decades remains an open question.

What I remember clearly is the pleasure of looking through the horror section, hoping to find something I hadn't seen before. I was already a devoted fan of zombie movies, and finding an unfamiliar title was no small accomplishment. Every video store carried the standards: Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and perhaps Lucio Fulci's Zombie. But each independent store might have one or two obscure titles that nobody else stocked. At Cinema Centre Video, I remember discovering Zombiethon, a bizarre 1986 compilation of scenes from zombie and exploitation films.

Today, finding an obscure movie takes a few seconds of searching. In 1993, it could take years. If a film wasn't available at one of your local video stores, there was a good chance you simply weren't going to see it. This made the stores more than rental businesses. They were gateways to unfamiliar worlds, and the people who stocked their shelves exercised an influence over our cultural lives that we probably didn't appreciate at the time.

Rockford's Independent Video Stores

Rockford had no shortage of places to rent movies. A 2024 retrospective published by local radio station 96.7 The Eagle recalled several businesses that longtime residents might remember, including Video Outlet, Silver Star Video, Express Discount Video, Logli Video, and Dollar Video. Each occupied its own place in the local video rental ecosystem.

Video Outlet was remembered as one of the area's larger locally operated chains, with multiple locations and a substantial selection of video games. It belonged to an era when movie rental and home video gaming were closely connected. For many families, a weekend trip to the video store meant choosing both a movie and a Nintendo or Sega game, sometimes spending more time making the selections than actually watching or playing them.

Silver Star Video, remembered near the intersection of Harlem Road and North Second Street, apparently made a particular impression on horror fans. The Eagle's retrospective recalled the store's cardboard promotional displays, including a Leatherface figure from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that startled customers as they wandered through the aisles. These displays were part of the theater of the video store. Movie posters, cardboard monsters, elaborate box art, and entire walls devoted to particular genres helped transform a commercial transaction into something resembling an expedition.

Express Discount Video operated on East Riverside Boulevard, in a location the Eagle identified in 2024 as an O'Reilly Auto Parts store. Its name reflected another important aspect of the rental business: price. Video stores competed not only on selection but also on rental rates, membership policies, specials, and the number of days customers could keep their movies. For teenagers and college students, those differences mattered.

There were also less conventional places to rent movies. Logli supermarkets offered video rentals, combining the weekly grocery trip with the opportunity to bring home a film. Dollar Video, remembered along the Route 251 corridor in Loves Park, represented the bargain end of the market. And there were undoubtedly smaller independent operations whose names have almost vanished from the internet.

Cinema Centre Video deserves a place in that history. Its surviving directory listing identifies the business at 2213 East State Street and names Dennis Sharp as owner. That isn't a complete history, but it's a beginning. Somewhere there may still be advertisements, photographs, business records, or former employees who remember its shelves, its customers, and the years it operated.

When the National Chains Arrived

Eventually, the independent stores found themselves competing with national chains such as Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, and Family Video. These businesses brought recognizable branding, standardized store layouts, extensive advertising, and the buying power to stock large numbers of popular new releases.

Blockbuster became one of the defining commercial institutions of the home-video era. Its blue-and-yellow signs were familiar across the country, and Rockford was no exception. Hollywood Video and Family Video also became part of the region's rental landscape. For a time, renting movies was such an established consumer habit that multiple stores could operate within relatively short distances of one another.

Family Video proved especially durable. Long after many competitors had disappeared, its stores remained familiar fixtures in northern Illinois. But even Family Video couldn't escape the changing economics of home entertainment. In September 2019, WIFR reported that the Family Video store in the 2700 block of Charles Street was closing, with the property slated to become a Dollar General. At the time, other Family Video locations in Loves Park, Belvidere, and Byron were still operating.

By January 2021, local residents were discussing the closure of the remaining Family Video stores. The industry that had once seemed permanent was reaching its conclusion.

And then there was Redbox, the automated rental kiosk that briefly seemed to offer a way for physical movie rentals to survive without maintaining an entire storefront. Redbox machines appeared outside grocery stores, pharmacies, and other retail businesses, reducing the rental experience to a small selection of discs and a credit card transaction.

Even that business model eventually failed. Redbox ceased operations in July 2024, and a May 2025 WTVO report found that its remaining kiosks had disappeared from the Rockford area.

The video rental store had gone from a neighborhood institution to a machine outside the supermarket, and finally to nothing at all.

What We Lost When the Video Stores Closed

It's tempting to explain the disappearance of video rental stores entirely in terms of technology. Streaming was more convenient, digital distribution reduced the need for physical inventory, and customers understandably preferred watching movies without leaving their homes. These changes were real, and there is no particularly convincing argument that the old rental system was more efficient.

But efficiency isn't the only measure of an experience.

Video stores offered something that modern streaming services have difficulty reproducing: the pleasure of accidental discovery. You could enter a store looking for the latest Hollywood blockbuster and leave with a low-budget horror movie, an obscure foreign film, or a documentary you'd never heard of. You might rent something because the cover looked interesting, because a friend recommended it, or because the clerk behind the counter insisted it was worth watching.

The selection was limited, but those limitations sometimes made discovery more meaningful. A store's inventory reflected the tastes of its owners, employees, distributors, and customers. No two independent stores were exactly alike. One might have an unusually good collection of martial arts films. Another might specialize in horror. Another might have an entire shelf of movies that seemed to exist nowhere else.

For horror fans in particular, video stores were an education. The VHS boom helped create audiences for obscure Italian zombie movies, low-budget American slashers, exploitation films, and countless productions that received little or no conventional theatrical distribution. Sometimes the artwork on the box was considerably better than the movie inside. Sometimes the movie was so peculiar that you remembered it for the rest of your life.

I certainly remember Zombiethon.

And I remember the larger Friday-night ritual. Buy some snacks, pick up a few beverages, rent five or six movies, and spend the weekend hoping that at least two or three were entertaining. For a college student, that was a perfectly satisfactory way to spend an evening. That and doing coursework, naturally.

There was also something social about the process. You encountered other customers, overheard conversations, argued with friends about what to rent, and occasionally received a recommendation from someone whose taste you trusted. A video store was a small public space organized around a shared interest in movies. It wasn't a grand cultural institution, but it was a place where culture circulated from one person to another.

Today, streaming services offer enormous catalogues, personalized recommendations, and immediate access to films that once required considerable effort to locate. There are obvious advantages to that. I wouldn't trade the ability to find an obscure movie in seconds for the necessity of searching half a dozen stores.

But I do miss the search itself.

Remembering Rockford's Lost Video Stores

The disappearance of Rockford's video rental stores is part of a much larger story about the changing American commercial landscape. Record shops, independent bookstores, neighborhood theaters, and video stores once occupied physical spaces where people encountered culture together. Some survived by adapting. Others disappeared almost completely.

What interests me is how quickly the physical evidence vanishes. A store that thousands of people visited over the course of a decade can become almost impossible to research thirty years later. The building remains, perhaps, but the sign is gone, the business directories are discarded, and the people who worked there have moved on.

That's one reason I wanted to write this article.

I would love to hear from Rockford residents who remember Cinema Centre Video, Video Outlet, Silver Star Video, Express Discount Video, Dollar Video, or any of the smaller stores that operated around the city. Where were they located? Who owned them? Which had the best horror section? Did you work at one? Do you have photographs, advertisements, membership cards, or even an old VHS rental case with the store's sticker still attached?

And if someone can tell me whether Cinema Centre Video operated near Rockford College around 1993, I'd especially appreciate solving that little mystery.

Because somewhere in Rockford, thirty-three years ago, I walked into a video store on a Friday night looking for something I hadn't seen before. I came home with a movie called Zombiethon, some snacks, and the expectation of an entertaining weekend.

I didn't realize I was participating in a cultural ritual that would eventually disappear.

I was just looking for a good zombie movie.

And I had to remember to rewind it.

Rockford's New Mayor, the Family Peace Center, and a Conversation Worth Having

By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

When Tom McNamara announced in July 2026 that he was stepping down as mayor of Rockford, the city's official announcement celebrated the accomplishments of his nine years in office. Among them was his role in establishing Illinois' first Family Peace Center, an institution dedicated to helping survivors of domestic violence and their families.

It was an accomplishment worth celebrating. The Family Peace Center, which opened in 2020, brought together services that had previously been scattered among different agencies. Its mission was to make it easier for survivors of abuse to obtain legal assistance, counseling, protection, and other resources without having to navigate an already difficult situation alone.

Less than two months after McNamara announced his departure, Rockford had a new mayor. Janessa Neal, formerly the city's Seventh Ward alderwoman, was selected by the City Council to serve as acting mayor until voters choose a successor in April 2027. Her appointment was historic. Neal became the first woman and first Black woman to lead Rockford.

There was, however, another part of Neal's recent history that deserves consideration alongside these accomplishments.

In February 2025, Neal, then known as Janessa Wilkins, was charged with misdemeanor domestic battery involving her teenage daughter. According to published accounts of the police investigation, the incident involved Neal striking the child with a belt. The matter was reported to authorities through a school resource officer.

On June 30, 2025, Neal pleaded guilty to misdemeanor domestic battery. Under the terms of a plea agreement, she received one year of court supervision and was required to complete anger-management classes. No judgment of conviction was entered as part of the reported agreement, and she was not sentenced to jail. Court supervision is a disposition under Illinois law that can allow a defendant to avoid a conviction upon successfully completing its conditions.

The case was not a secret. It was reported by local news organizations when the charges were filed and again when the court proceedings concluded. Neal's legal history also became a subject of public discussion when the City Council considered her appointment as mayor.

On August 10, 2026, the council selected Neal over Fifth Ward Alderwoman Gabrielle Torina by a vote of six to four, with three alderpersons abstaining. The appointment followed questions about the legal procedure for replacing a departing mayor, as well as political disagreements among council members.

Fourteenth Ward Alderman Mark Bonne, who ultimately supported Neal, acknowledged that her domestic battery case had influenced his earlier votes against her. Speaking to Rockford News First, Bonne argued that people should not be judged solely by their worst actions and noted that Neal had gone through the court process.

That is a reasonable perspective to include in any discussion of the appointment. People make mistakes, accept consequences, and work to improve their lives. The justice system itself recognizes the possibility of rehabilitation, and completing court supervision is not an insignificant matter.

But rehabilitation and public accountability are not necessarily opposing principles. A person can be entitled to move forward with their life while the public remains entitled to ask questions about the responsibilities entrusted to that person.

And in Rockford, those questions carry particular significance.

The Family Peace Center and the McNamara Legacy

The Family Peace Center was not a peripheral initiative of the McNamara administration. It was among its most visible commitments. In 2017, McNamara and the City Council created the Mayor's Office of Domestic and Community Violence Prevention. The Family Peace Center opened three years later, and its work has continued to expand.

In March 2026, McNamara appeared at a news conference announcing plans to bring specialized medical services for abused children and families into the Family Peace Center's future downtown location. Speaking to the Rock River Current, he described the expansion as a commitment to a coordinated and compassionate response to abuse. He also emphasized the importance of providing children and families with the support they deserve.

The project involves millions of dollars, numerous community partners, and a substantial investment of public and private resources. Its work should not be diminished by the political questions surrounding the mayor's office. The professionals helping survivors and vulnerable children deserve recognition for what they do.

Nevertheless, the Family Peace Center's association with the mayor's office raises an obvious question.

If addressing domestic violence is important enough to be celebrated as a defining achievement of McNamara's administration, what should the public make of his support for a successor who had recently pleaded guilty to domestic battery?

McNamara publicly endorsed Neal following her selection, expressing enthusiasm about her leadership and the historic significance of a woman becoming mayor. In the published comments reviewed for this article, he did not address her criminal case or explain how he reconciled his endorsement with his administration's longstanding commitment to domestic violence prevention.

We found no public statement from McNamara directly addressing that apparent tension. That does not establish that he has never discussed it, but it leaves a question that seems worthy of a public answer.

Why, if the Family Peace Center is an important part of McNamara's legacy, has there been no readily identifiable public explanation of his position on the domestic battery case involving the person who succeeded him?

This is not a demand that McNamara condemn Neal, nor an assertion that she should have been permanently disqualified from public office. It is simply a question about how a public commitment is understood and applied when circumstances become personally or politically complicated.

What Did Rockford Know?

One of the more interesting aspects of this story is that nearly all its individual elements were publicly reported.

Local television news covered the domestic battery charge, the court proceedings, and the City Council's selection of Neal. The Rockford Register Star reported on her guilty plea and court supervision. Rockford News First interviewed council members about the appointment, including alderpersons who acknowledged concerns about Neal's legal history.

In September, the Register Star published a letter to the editor from Olivia Carstens of Roscoe questioning what message the appointment sent to survivors of domestic violence and child abuse. Carstens also acknowledged that people should have opportunities for learning, growth, and rehabilitation.

That letter was an opinion submitted by a reader, however, rather than an independently reported investigation.

The Rock River Current covered the political maneuvering and procedural uncertainty surrounding Neal's appointment. It has also reported extensively on the Family Peace Center and McNamara's advocacy for domestic violence prevention. Our review found no substantive reporting from either the Rock River Current or the Rock River Times examining Neal's criminal case in connection with the city's domestic violence prevention commitments.

This observation is not meant to suggest that local news organizations deliberately concealed information. The individual events received coverage, and reporters have many competing demands on their time. But the distinction between reporting events separately and examining what those events mean together is an important one.

It is possible for a community to have access to information without ever having a sustained public conversation about it.

And this seems like a conversation Rockford should be capable of having.

A Question of Public Standards

Domestic battery involving a child is not identical to intimate-partner violence, and the circumstances of Neal's case should not be misrepresented. But the Family Peace Center's mission extends beyond intimate-partner violence to include the needs of children and families affected by abuse. Its planned expansion includes specialized medical services for abused children.

That makes the relationship between the criminal case and the city's institutional commitments more than a rhetorical comparison.

The question is not whether a person who has pleaded guilty to a crime must forever be excluded from public life. Nor is it whether completing court supervision should be dismissed as meaningless.

The question is what standards a community expects its leaders to apply, how those standards are communicated, and whether they remain consistent when the circumstances involve colleagues and political allies.

The City Council had the authority to consider Neal for the position, and its members made their selection. At least one alderman publicly acknowledged weighing her criminal case against the possibility of rehabilitation. Other council members emphasized her leadership qualities and ability to work with different perspectives.

Those explanations deserve to be heard.

So do the concerns of residents who believe the appointment raises questions about the city's stated priorities.

There is no need to assume bad faith on either side to recognize that these questions exist.

Rockford has invested considerable civic pride, public resources, and institutional energy in helping survivors of domestic violence. That work has real consequences for people who need assistance, sometimes at the most vulnerable moments of their lives.

The city also has a mayor who, a little more than a year before taking office, pleaded guilty to domestic battery involving her own child.

Both things are true.

The question is not whether Rockford should abandon its commitment to rehabilitation or its commitment to protecting people from abuse. A thoughtful community ought to be able to recognize the importance of both.

The question is whether its leaders are willing to explain how those commitments fit together.

And perhaps, before the next mayoral election, Rockford residents deserve an opportunity to hear that explanation.

Sources and Further Reading

• Rockford Register Star. Rockford alderwoman gets court supervision in domestic battery case. June 2025.

• Rockford News First / WIFR. Rockford council member charged with domestic battery after hitting teen with belt, police say. March 3, 2025.

• Rockford News First / WIFR. Rockford City Council praises acting mayor selection despite legal concerns. August 2026.

• Rockford News First / WIFR. Rockford residents weigh in on acting mayor decision at Politics Over Pizza. August 2026.

• Rock River Current. Specialized medical team to join Family Peace Center at new location in 2027. March 2026.

• City of Rockford. Official announcement concerning Mayor Tom McNamara's departure. July 2026.

• Rockford Register Star. What message is being sent with Rockford mayoral appointment?. Letter to the editor by Olivia Carstens. September 2026.

Necromancers Don't Read Toe Tags

 

Bruce Richardson Was on Rockford Television for 35 Years. How Did We Almost Forget Him?

By Thomas L. Vaultonburg | Rockford Blog | October 8, 2026

For thirty-five years, Bruce Richardson came into the living rooms of Rockford-area families and told them what was happening in their community and the world. He was there for the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the moon landing, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He reported the news through seven presidential administrations, from Dwight Eisenhower to George H. W. Bush. He was, for a substantial portion of his career, one of the most recognizable people in northern Illinois. And today, if you go looking for information about him, you will discover something rather astonishing. There is almost nothing readily available.

Bruce Richardson and Monica Schneider WTVO Rockford

Not literally nothing, of course. His name appears in histories of WTVO Channel 17, where he worked from 1956 until his retirement in June 1992. There are scattered photographs, a few old advertisements, and the occasional surviving piece of television footage. But for a man who spent more than three decades appearing on television, the accessible historical record is remarkably thin. How does someone become such a familiar part of the lives of tens of thousands of people and leave behind so little of his professional life for future generations to discover?

I have a particular interest in this question because Bruce Richardson wasn't just someone I watched on television. He was someone I knew. I grew up in Byron, Illinois, where Bruce Richardson and his family also lived. I went to school with one of his children, Brett, and saw Bruce at sporting events, school functions, birthday parties, and the other ordinary occasions that bring families together in a small town. This is one of the peculiar things about growing up in a place like Byron. Someone could be a television celebrity throughout northern Illinois and still be somebody's dad at a school event. The distinction between the famous person on television and the neighbor you encountered around town was considerably less dramatic than it might have been somewhere else.

Bruce was a familiar presence in both worlds. At home, he was the man delivering the evening news. In Byron, he was Brett's father, someone I might encounter at a basketball game or a birthday party. I didn't think there was anything particularly extraordinary about that arrangement at the time. It was simply part of growing up. Looking back, though, I find it remarkable. Here was a man whose professional life involved communicating with an enormous audience, whose face and voice were familiar to generations of viewers, and whose personal life overlapped with my own in the most ordinary ways imaginable. I don't remember thinking of Bruce Richardson as a historical figure. Why would I? He was just Bruce.

Bruce Richardson joined WTVO in 1956, only three years after the station began broadcasting. At the time, television was still establishing itself as the dominant medium for news and entertainment in American homes. Rockford's television industry was young, and the people who worked in it were helping invent the local broadcasting traditions that subsequent generations would take for granted. A broadcasting industry directory from 1969 identifies Richardson as WTVO's news director. Over the years, he became closely associated with the station's news coverage, and his name was prominent enough that the station used the title Bruce Richardson and the News during part of its history.

Richardson worked alongside other familiar Rockford television personalities, including Monica Schneider, weatherman Bob Kevern, and sportscaster Bob Lewis. For many viewers, these people formed a kind of extended television family, appearing in their homes night after night. Richardson retired in June 1992 after more than thirty-five years at WTVO. The station's historical accounts identify him as Rockford's longest-serving television news anchor. Children who watched Bruce Richardson with their parents in the late 1950s could have been watching him with their own children in the 1980s. Families moved into new homes, changed jobs, married, divorced, raised children, and buried relatives, while Bruce Richardson continued appearing on their television screens. He became part of the background rhythm of life in northern Illinois.

One of my clearest recollections of Richardson's television career is a feature called Bruce on the Loose. I remember the name. I remember that it was part of his television identity. And I know I'm not the only person who remembers it. Recently, while looking through a Facebook discussion in the Rockford Rocked group about Richardson and Monica Schneider, I came across a comment from a former WTVO employee named Dave Charles. Charles recalled meeting Richardson after his retirement and mentioned that a few promotional items for Bruce on the Loose were still at the television station. That was an exciting discovery because it independently corroborated a memory I'd carried around for decades.

The segment existed. At least two people remember it, including someone who worked at the station. According to Charles, physical promotional materials associated with the feature survived at WTVO after Richardson retired. And yet, searching for Bruce on the Loose today produces almost no accessible evidence of the Rockford program. No readily discoverable collection of episodes. No substantial history of the feature. No obvious digital archive preserving its broadcasts. I don't want to invent details about what the segment involved simply because I remember its name. Memory is an imperfect historical instrument, and the passage of decades doesn't improve its accuracy. But the existence of the feature is supported by more than my recollection alone. Somewhere, perhaps in a box of station memorabilia, a private videotape collection, or an old employee's belongings, there may still be something that tells us more.

The Facebook discussion that prompted this investigation is fascinating in its own right. It features a photograph of Richardson and Monica Schneider, followed by dozens of comments from people who remember watching them, working with them, or encountering them around the community. One commenter remembered Richardson riding a Harley-Davidson Sportster purchased at Kegel's. Another recalled seeing him in Byron. Someone remembered that Monica Schneider's dog Buddy sometimes slept beneath the anchor desk during broadcasts. Alan Andersen, who identified himself as a WTVO broadcast engineer from 1984 to 1989, remembered Richardson enthusiastically. Brad Plock recalled that his father had worked at the station for fifty years as a film director. Others remembered Bob Kevern's weather forecasts, Bob Lewis's sports reports, and the personalities who helped make Channel 17 a fixture in Rockford households.

These aren't necessarily the details that make it into official histories of television broadcasting. But they're the details that make history human. A television station's corporate history might tell us when it changed ownership or switched network affiliations. It probably won't tell us about the dog sleeping beneath the anchor desk. And yet, fifty years from now, which detail do you suppose someone will find more interesting? These seemingly insignificant recollections are the little pieces of human experience that give a community its character. Without them, history becomes a collection of dates, names, and buildings, with most of the actual living left out.

One particularly intriguing discovery came from another commenter, Barton Fishoff, who shared a link to a surviving piece of WTVO footage from 1970. According to his description, it was part of an unfinished documentary about the environment, filmed on 16mm, that featured Bruce Richardson. The footage can be viewed on YouTube, a rare opportunity to encounter a fragment of Rockford television history that might otherwise have disappeared. It also raises a larger question: How much locally produced television from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s still exists somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered?

Early television wasn't created with future historians in mind. Much of it was broadcast live, and recordings weren't always preserved. Videotape was expensive, storage space was limited, and stations frequently reused or discarded material that had already served its immediate purpose. A news broadcast might have been watched by thousands of people on a Tuesday evening and then effectively vanished. For those of us who grew up watching local television, this creates a strange historical problem. We remember people and programs that were once ubiquitous, but we have remarkably little physical evidence of them. It's almost as though an entire layer of our shared cultural experience has been erased. Not because it wasn't important, but because nobody anticipated how important it might become.

I keep coming back to the extraordinary length of Bruce Richardson's career. Thirty-five years. That's longer than most people remain in a single profession, let alone a position that places them before a television audience on a regular basis. For decades, Richardson was one of the people Rockford trusted to tell it what was happening. He helped create the public record of a city and a region. His work was concerned, almost by definition, with preserving the events of the present so that people could understand their world. And yet, much of the record of his own professional life is now difficult to locate. There is an irony in that which I find difficult to shake. The man who spent thirty-five years telling Rockford its story now needs Rockford to tell his.

I also think about Brett, and the sporting events and birthday parties and school functions where I encountered his father. Those are memories that belong to an entirely different category from television history. They're memories of a community, of childhood, of people who existed in our lives before we understood that someday we would want to remember them. Bruce Richardson was part of my childhood in two different ways, and I suspect many other people throughout northern Illinois had their own versions of that experience. Some knew him as a colleague. Some as a neighbor. Some as a friend. Some knew him only as the familiar face that appeared on Channel 17. All of those memories are part of the same story.

One of the reasons I started writing about Rockford history was the realization that so much of what makes a community distinctive exists outside the official historical record. The people who ran neighborhood businesses, the musicians who played in local bars, the artists who created things that never traveled beyond Winnebago County, and the television personalities who appeared in our living rooms for decades all contributed to the culture of this place. But cultural memory is fragile. If nobody writes these things down, if nobody preserves the photographs or recordings, if nobody bothers to ask the people who were there, an astonishing amount of history can disappear in a single generation.

Bruce Richardson deserves more than a brief mention in a television station's history. So I'm asking readers of Rockford Blog to help reconstruct the story. Did you watch Bruce Richardson on WTVO? Do you remember Bruce on the Loose? Were you ever interviewed by him? Did you work at Channel 17, or do you have old photographs, promotional materials, videotapes, or newspaper clippings from his career? I'd especially like to hear from people who remember what Bruce on the Loose involved and when it aired. Maybe someone still has a recording. Maybe there's a box of promotional materials somewhere at WTVO. Maybe a former employee has photographs nobody has seen in decades. Or maybe the most important things people have to contribute are their memories.

I grew up in Byron knowing Bruce Richardson as Brett's father, a man I encountered at the same school events and birthday parties as everyone else. At the same time, he was one of the most familiar faces on television throughout northern Illinois. It never occurred to me then that his story might someday become difficult to tell. After thirty-five years on our television screens, surely we can find a way to remember the man who was there for so much of our lives.

---

 

Mr. Mustache: Remembering Bruce Lewis and Rockford's Forgotten Children's Television Show

By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

There was a time when children's television wasn't something produced in Hollywood or streamed from a server halfway around the world. It was something made right here in Rockford, Illinois, by people who lived in the same neighborhoods, shopped in the same stores, and sometimes recognized the children watching them on television. Before cable television offered hundreds of channels, before YouTube, and long before children carried their entertainment around in their pockets, local television stations produced their own programs for young audiences. And for a generation of Rockford children, one of the most memorable personalities to emerge from that era was a man named Mr. Mustache.

Mr. Mustache

His real name was Bruce Lewis, and from 1967 until 1982, he was a familiar presence on Channel 23, the Rockford television station now known as WIFR. During those fifteen years, Lewis entertained local children with drawings, puppets, humor, and personal appearances on his weekly television program. He belonged to an almost vanished tradition of local children's entertainers, men and women who became celebrities within a relatively small geographic area while remaining virtually unknown everywhere else. If you grew up in Rockford during those years, Mr. Mustache might have been as familiar to you as Captain Kangaroo or Mister Rogers. If you grew up somewhere else, chances are you never heard of him.

Who Was Mr. Mustache?

Bruce Lewis was born around 1942 and became one of the most recognizable local television personalities in Rockford during the late 1960s and 1970s. His program began in 1967, a period when local television stations still had considerable freedom to develop their own programming. Channel 23 was then known as WCEE-TV, and the station provided a home for Lewis and his particular combination of artistic talent and children's entertainment.

Unlike television personalities who simply introduced cartoons between commercial breaks, Lewis was himself a creative performer. He drew pictures, worked with puppets, and interacted directly with children who attended his programs. His artistic abilities were an important part of his appeal. Drawing wasn't merely something he did away from the camera. It was part of what made Mr. Mustache Mr. Mustache.

When Lewis died in November 2009, a Channel 23 remembrance described him as Rockford's own version of Mister Rogers. The comparison was particularly revealing. Fred Rogers became a national institution by treating children as people worthy of attention, kindness, and respect. Bruce Lewis, working on a much smaller stage, seems to have inspired similar affection among the children who watched him.

A Television Star Who Belonged to Rockford

One of the most remarkable things about the history of Mr. Mustache is how thoroughly local the entire enterprise was. In researching the program, I discovered that the name Mr. Mustache was actually registered as a trademark by a Rockford company called Tri-Arts Productions. The trademark application was filed on January 5, 1968, and listed September 27, 1967, as the date of first use. The registration was approved on October 29, 1968.

Even more interesting is the address associated with the trademark: 831 North Church Street, Rockford, Illinois. This wasn't a character developed by a national television network and distributed to stations around the country. The documentary trail leads directly back to Rockford, where the name was being used and commercially protected by a local production company. The registration eventually expired in 1992, but its surviving record provides an unusually precise historical marker for the beginnings of Mr. Mustache.

There is something appealing about the idea of a children's television personality being developed in Rockford during the same period that national television was becoming increasingly centralized. While the big networks were building national entertainment franchises, somebody on North Church Street was making sure the name Mr. Mustache belonged to a local production enterprise. It suggests an ambition to make something recognizable and enduring, even if its primary audience consisted of children living within range of a northern Illinois television transmitter.

The Children Who Became Part of the Show

One of the features that distinguished Mr. Mustache from nationally syndicated children's programming was the opportunity for local children to participate. Bruce Lewis didn't simply perform for an invisible audience on the other side of the television screen. Children attended his programs and interacted with him, creating memories that remained important to them decades later.

That participation is central to understanding the appeal of early local television. For a child growing up in Rockford in the 1970s, appearing on television was a genuine event. There were no smartphones, no social media accounts, and no easy way to broadcast yourself to the world. Being invited into a television studio and appearing on a program watched by other children around town could be an extraordinary experience. You might go to school the following week knowing that your classmates had seen you on Channel 23.

The show's combination of puppetry, drawing, and direct interaction also placed it within a long tradition of children's entertainment that valued imagination over expensive production. A talented artist with a drawing surface, a few puppets, and the ability to communicate with children could create an entire world. There was no need for elaborate digital effects or an army of animators. The magic came from watching something happen in front of you.

And because Lewis was a local personality, the boundary between the television studio and the community was unusually thin. Mr. Mustache wasn't a distant celebrity whose appearances were carefully managed by a national publicity department. He was Bruce Lewis, a working artist and entertainer who lived in the community he served.

Fifteen Years of Rockford Television History

The years between 1967 and 1982 were a remarkable period of change in American television. When Mr. Mustache first appeared, television was still dominated by the three major commercial networks, and local stations filled portions of their schedules with locally produced programs. By the time his run ended, cable television was beginning to transform viewing habits, and the economic incentives for producing original local children's programming were changing.

Mr. Mustache survived through much of that transition. Fifteen years is an impressive run for any local television personality, particularly one working in a market the size of Rockford. It meant that children who first encountered the program in the late 1960s could have younger brothers and sisters who were still watching it in the early 1980s.

The show's longevity also explains why it occupies such a distinctive place in Rockford nostalgia. Mr. Mustache wasn't simply a program that happened to be on television for a season or two. He was part of the everyday cultural environment of the city for a substantial portion of an entire generation's childhood.

And yet, like so much early local television, the program has largely disappeared from the accessible historical record. We can document the years it aired, identify its creator, and establish some of its activities, but the surviving online information is surprisingly limited. The precise episode count, complete broadcast schedule, detailed production history, and extent of any surviving recordings remain questions worth investigating.

The Artist Behind the Mustache

Bruce Lewis's artistic talents extended beyond his television character. When Channel 23 reported his death in 2009, the station specifically remembered his drawings and artistic impressions, noting that both his older artwork and more recent creations continued to attract interest. The remembrance also described him as someone who contributed his creativity to numerous local projects.

That part of Lewis's story deserves particular attention. It suggests that Mr. Mustache was not simply a television job performed by a man whose real interests lay elsewhere. Lewis was an artist who found a way to bring his creative abilities into children's lives through the medium of television.

Local broadcaster Andy Gannon remembered Lewis as a friendly and generous individual who made time for other people. It's a small detail, but an important one. Television can manufacture the appearance of warmth and sincerity, but the memories people leave behind among their colleagues and neighbors often reveal more about them than the characters they performed.

Lewis appears to have been remembered not only for what he did on television but for the kind of person he was away from the cameras.

The End of an Era

Mr. Mustache's regular television run ended in 1982. The available historical record doesn't establish exactly why the program concluded, and it would be misleading to attribute its cancellation to any single cause without additional documentation. What can be said is that its departure came during a period when locally produced children's television was becoming increasingly uncommon.

There was a time when virtually every television market had its own children's personalities. Some were clowns, some were cowboys, some were magicians, and others were simply friendly adults who introduced cartoons and invited children to become part of the show. These performers were often deeply embedded in their communities, appearing at schools, shopping centers, charity events, and local celebrations.

Many of these programs were produced live or under circumstances in which recordings were not routinely preserved. Videotape was expensive, storage was limited, and few stations anticipated that people would someday want to study their children's programming as an important part of local cultural history.

Consequently, the history of local television is full of missing programs, forgotten performers, and memories that exist primarily in the minds of the people who watched them. Mr. Mustache belongs to that larger story, but he also represents something specifically Rockford's own.

Remembering Bruce Lewis

Bruce Lewis died of cancer in November 2009 at the age of 67. His death prompted a remembrance from Channel 23, the station where he had spent so many years entertaining local children. The station recalled his drawings, puppets, and the generations of children who had appeared on his program. For many of those former young viewers, visiting Mr. Mustache was still a cherished memory decades after the television show ended.

There is something particularly poignant about the disappearance of local children's television. Unlike a national program, which might survive indefinitely through syndication, streaming services, and commercial releases, a locally produced program can vanish almost completely once it leaves the air. Its host grows older, the children who watched it become adults, and eventually the entire experience becomes a story that one generation tells another.

But that doesn't mean it was unimportant. Quite the opposite. For thousands of children, local television personalities were among their earliest encounters with art, performance, humor, and the possibility that an ordinary person living in their own community could create something wonderful.

Bruce Lewis spent fifteen years doing precisely that.

Today, Mr. Mustache is part of Rockford's collective memory, a reminder of a time when a local artist could become a television star simply by being imaginative, generous with his talents, and willing to entertain the children of his hometown.

And perhaps that's the part of the story most worth remembering. Rockford didn't need Hollywood to give its children Mr. Mustache. Rockford had Bruce Lewis.

Do you remember watching Mr. Mustache on Channel 23? Were you ever a guest on the program? Does your family have photographs, drawings, memorabilia, or recordings from the show? I'd especially like to hear from people who knew Bruce Lewis or remember visiting the television studio. Local history is often preserved not in official archives but in family photo albums, boxes in attics, and the memories of people who were there. If you have a Mr. Mustache story, please share it in the comments so this remarkable piece of Rockford television history doesn't disappear.

 

The Ghost of Kennedy Hill Road

By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Every small town seems to have at least one road you're supposed to drive after dark if you want to encounter something you can't explain. Around Byron, Illinois, one of those places was Kennedy Hill Road. The story, as I remember hearing it growing up, concerned a mysterious woman in white who appeared along the road at night. Drivers would catch sight of her moving along the roadside, illuminated for a moment in the headlights before darkness swallowed her again.

Who was the Ghost of Kennedy Hill Road?

It had all the necessary ingredients for a proper northern Illinois ghost story: a lonely country road, darkness, cornfields and woods, a figure dressed in white appearing unexpectedly beside the pavement and, most importantly, generations of young people willing to scare the hell out of one another. Kennedy Hill Road didn't need much assistance. Drive the rural roads around Byron late enough at night and the familiar landscape changes. Farmhouses become isolated points of light. Trees become walls. Your headlights illuminate only a small piece of the world at a time while everything beyond them disappears.

Then somebody tells you that people have seen a woman in white out there, and from that moment on every mailbox becomes a person. Every pale tree trunk becomes a dress. Every movement at the edge of the headlights becomes something running alongside the road. That's how local legends work. Somebody sees something. Somebody else tells the story. Details get added. The story passes through school hallways, cars, parties and bedrooms until eventually nobody remembers exactly where it started. They only know you're supposed to look for the woman in white.

The woman in white is one of the great recurring figures in ghost stories. She's usually somebody who died tragically. Sometimes she's searching for a lost child or lover. Sometimes she was killed on the very road where she continues to appear. Sometimes nobody knows who she is at all. The uncertainty is part of what keeps the story alive. If you explain the woman in white, you don't have much of a ghost story anymore.

Except in the case of the Ghost of Kennedy Hill Road, I happen to know something about the ghost.

I went to grade school in Byron, and my first real crush was a girl there. Eventually I learned something interesting about her mother. She liked to jog. She sometimes went jogging at night. She went jogging on Kennedy Hill Road. And when she did, she wore a white jogging outfit.

So while other people may have spent years wondering about the identity of the spectral woman in white haunting Kennedy Hill Road, I've always had a somewhat less supernatural theory. The Ghost of Kennedy Hill Road was probably the mother of my first grade-school crush.

She wasn't searching eternally for her murdered lover. She hadn't risen from a forgotten pioneer cemetery. She wasn't trying to warn travelers away from some terrible fate waiting around the next curve.

She was exercising.

Which, when you think about it, is exactly the kind of explanation a small-town ghost story deserves. Somewhere along the way, somebody driving Kennedy Hill Road at night saw a pale figure moving through the darkness at the edge of their headlights. They went home with a ghost story.

And somebody's mom went home having gotten her miles in.

 

The Woman in White at Tinker Swiss Cottage: One of Rockford’s Best Ghost Stories

By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

There are buildings that acquire ghost stories because somebody decides they ought to have one. Tinker Swiss Cottage is not one of them. Strange stories have accumulated around the house for years: footsteps, voices, humming, unexplained touches and apparitions glimpsed in rooms and hallways. Today, the museum openly acknowledges that part of its reputation and hosts paranormal tours and investigations.

Is Tinker Swiss Cottage Haunted?

One of the best Tinker stories, though, is remarkably simple. During an early Haunted Rockford visit to the cottage, a woman on the tour mentioned how much she had enjoyed seeing the historical interpreter dressed in period clothing. She described a woman near the suspension bridge with dark hair pulled into a bun, dressed entirely in white. There was only one problem: there was no historical interpreter dressed in white.

That is what makes the story work. Nothing spectacular happens. No chains rattle. No doors slam. Nobody runs screaming from the building. A woman simply walks past another woman who apparently isn't there.

Tinker Swiss Cottage itself provides about as good a setting for a Rockford ghost story as anyone could invent. Robert Hall Tinker began building the unusual Swiss-inspired house in 1865 after returning from travels in Europe. He and Mary Dorr Manny Tinker eventually made it their home, and Robert became an important figure in early Rockford civic life, including serving as mayor.

Several members of the extended family died in the house, including Mary in 1901, and funerals were conducted in its parlor. But perhaps more interesting than any individual ghost story is what happened to the house afterward: it wasn't emptied.

The Tinker family's furniture, clothing, dishes, artwork, diaries and other possessions remained associated with the property when it became a museum. Walking into Tinker Swiss Cottage therefore isn't quite like walking into a historical building that has subsequently been furnished to resemble another era. Much of what surrounds you actually belonged to the people who lived there.

That alone can make a place feel inhabited.

Over the years, visitors, staff and paranormal investigators have reported children's voices, humming and whistling, unexplained touching, footsteps and apparitions. Another account describes a woman's voice calling “Hello?” from downstairs while a group was gathered upstairs and the building was supposedly secured.

Whether any of these experiences have supernatural explanations is another question entirely. Old houses make noises. Expectations affect perception. Memories change in the retelling. A good local ghost story doesn't require us to settle the question.

What matters is that Tinker Swiss Cottage has become one of Rockford's signature haunted places, and it's difficult to imagine a better one. An elaborate Victorian-era house sits above Kent Creek. A suspension bridge crosses the ravine. Railroad tracks run below the bluff. Inside, rooms remain crowded with possessions belonging to people who died generations ago.

And every once in a while, according to the stories, somebody encounters another visitor.

A woman with dark hair, wearing a white dress.

Someone who seems perfectly ordinary until you ask who she was.

 

The Ghosts of the Coronado Theatre: Rockford's Haunted Wonder Palace

By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

There are buildings in Rockford that seem perfectly content to exist in the present, and there are buildings that appear to have brought the past along with them. The Coronado Theatre, standing at 314 North Main Street since 1927, belongs firmly in the second category. With its elaborate Spanish castles, Italian villas, artificial night sky, and mysterious corridors, the Coronado has always seemed like the sort of place where something extraordinary might happen. According to nearly a century of local folklore, some of those extraordinary things have continued happening long after the actors have left the stage and the audience has gone home.

For generations, employees, performers, and visitors have reported unusual experiences inside Rockford's magnificent old movie palace. There are stories of mysterious figures appearing in empty rooms, unexplained footsteps, the sudden smell of perfume or cigar smoke, and the unsettling sensation that someone is watching from a darkened corner of the building. Among the alleged inhabitants are a woman dressed in white, a man wearing a bowler hat, and several individuals associated with the theater's earliest years.

Whether these encounters represent supernatural activity, the suggestive atmosphere of an old building, or simply the human tendency to invent stories about places we love is another question entirely. But the stories themselves have become part of the Coronado's history, and they reveal something interesting about the relationship between Rockford and one of its most beloved landmarks.

To understand why the Coronado has accumulated so many ghosts, it helps to understand why the building exists in the first place.

In the 1920s, Rockford was a prosperous industrial city, producing furniture, machinery, hardware, and other manufactured goods that helped establish its reputation as an important center of American industry. Among its prominent businessmen was Willard Van Matre, a piano manufacturer who believed Rockford deserved an entertainment palace comparable to the spectacular theaters being constructed in Chicago and other major cities.

Van Matre commissioned architect Frederic J. Klein to design an extraordinary new theater in downtown Rockford. The resulting building cost approximately $1.5 million, an enormous investment at the time, and opened on October 9, 1927. It was quickly celebrated as Rockford's Wonder Theatre.

The Coronado was constructed in the atmospheric theater style, an architectural movement that sought to transform the experience of attending a movie into something resembling an evening spent outdoors in an exotic European courtyard. Instead of ordinary walls and a conventional ceiling, patrons encountered elaborate architectural fantasies beneath a simulated night sky. Electric stars twinkled overhead, artificial clouds drifted across the ceiling, and the surrounding walls suggested buildings from some romanticized Mediterranean city that existed primarily in the architect's imagination.

The effect must have been astonishing to audiences accustomed to more modest entertainment venues. A person could walk in from an ordinary Rockford street, purchase a ticket, and suddenly find themselves sitting beneath the stars in a Spanish courtyard, waiting for a motion picture to begin.

The building also contained an enormous Grande Barton pipe organ, designed to accompany silent films and provide musical entertainment. Its pipes, mechanical apparatus, and elaborate decorative features added another dimension to the theater's already extravagant personality.

And, perhaps inevitably, a building this elaborate began collecting stories.

One of the more intriguing details of the Coronado's original construction was the inclusion of a private apartment for Willard Van Matre and his wife, Irma. This wasn't simply a theater built by a wealthy businessman. It was a place in which the owner and his family maintained a personal presence. The apartment remains an important feature of the building's history, and it has become central to some of the supernatural legends associated with the property.

According to accounts collected by local historians and paranormal enthusiasts, some believe that Willard and Irma Van Matre never entirely departed their magnificent creation. Their spirits have been suggested as possible explanations for unusual occurrences reported in the building. Other stories identify former theater manager Louis St. Pierre and a former secretary as potential ghostly residents.

Of course, identifying the spirit responsible for a mysterious noise or an unexpected whiff of perfume is considerably more difficult than identifying the person who designed the theater. The names attached to these hauntings belong to the realm of folklore rather than established historical fact. Nevertheless, the stories have persisted.

Perhaps the best-known Coronado apparition is the Lady in White, a mysterious female figure reportedly encountered in the building. Another recurring character is a man wearing a bowler hat, whose appearance seems particularly appropriate for a theater that opened during the final years of the silent-film era. The stories also include unexplained scents of perfume and cigar smoke, the latter suggesting that at least one of the theater's alleged ghosts has not been informed of modern indoor smoking regulations.

These are familiar elements in the folklore of haunted theaters. Ghostly women in pale dresses, mysterious gentlemen in old-fashioned clothing, and unexplained sounds from empty auditoriums appear in stories associated with historic performance venues throughout the country. The Coronado's legends belong to this larger tradition, but their connection to actual people and places in Rockford gives them a distinctly local character.

The theater's physical environment certainly contributes to the atmosphere. A building designed to imitate an outdoor courtyard at night is already engaged in a kind of elaborate deception. Its stars are electrical fixtures. Its buildings are theatrical scenery. Its sky is a ceiling. The Coronado was designed from the beginning to persuade visitors that they were somewhere other than where they actually stood.

In a place where illusion is part of the architecture, perhaps it isn't surprising that the imagination occasionally supplies a few additional inhabitants.

The Coronado's history also contains enough genuine drama to make supernatural embellishment almost unnecessary.

Over the decades, the theater hosted an extraordinary collection of performers. Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, George Gershwin, the Marx Brothers, Bob Hope, Tommy Dorsey, Sammy Davis Jr., and Gypsy Rose Lee are among the entertainment legends associated with its stage. The building also served as a movie theater, a venue for school graduations, political gatherings, and countless community events.

For generations of Rockford residents, the Coronado wasn't an architectural landmark so much as a place where important moments happened. People went there on first dates, attended concerts, watched movies, and participated in the ceremonies that mark the passage from one stage of life to another. Thousands of personal histories became attached to the building.

By the 1990s, however, the Wonder Theatre was in serious trouble.

Its once-magnificent interior had deteriorated, and the building suffered from water leaks, outdated mechanical systems, and other problems that threatened its future. Mary Ann Smith, a longtime advocate for the theater, recognized the danger and helped organize the movement that eventually became the Friends of the Coronado in 1997.

The effort to save the theater became one of Rockford's most remarkable historic preservation projects. More than 5,000 donors contributed to an $18.5 million restoration, while hundreds of volunteers provided labor and support. The restored Coronado reopened in January 2001, its architectural splendor renewed and its facilities adapted for modern performances.

There is something almost supernatural about that achievement itself. A building that might easily have become another casualty of downtown decline was brought back to life through the determination of people who refused to let it disappear.

And the ghost stories survived the renovation.

In October 2025, Rock River Current reporter Kevin Haas documented the Coronado's supernatural reputation in an article about a new event called Spirits & Spirits. The gathering combined tastings of alcoholic beverages with stories of the theater's alleged hauntings. Tour guides associated with the Land of Lincoln Theatre Organ Society were enlisted to share tales of apparitions, mysterious smells, and other unexplained occurrences.

The event represented an interesting development in the theater's relationship with its own folklore. Rather than treating the ghost stories as embarrassing superstitions to be ignored, the Coronado was embracing them as another part of the building's personality.

After all, a theater exists to tell stories. Why shouldn't some of those stories concern the theater itself?

The Coronado has also attracted attention from paranormal enthusiasts who have investigated or discussed its reputation over the years. Online collections of haunted locations contain accounts from visitors who claim to have witnessed unusual events, including unexplained figures and strange sensations. Other visitors report experiencing nothing unusual whatsoever.

That is generally how ghost stories work. The evidence is inconsistent, the witnesses are sincere or at least enthusiastic, and the ghosts remain stubbornly unwilling to make themselves available for a properly documented interview.

But perhaps the question of whether the Coronado is actually haunted is less interesting than the question of why Rockford wants it to be.

Historic theaters occupy a peculiar place in the American imagination. Unlike factories, office buildings, or warehouses, they were constructed specifically to manufacture emotional experiences. People entered them to laugh, cry, fall in love, become frightened, and temporarily escape the circumstances of their ordinary lives. The buildings themselves became repositories of those experiences.

When we enter an old theater, we are surrounded by the accumulated memories of people who occupied the same seats decades before us. Their clothes were different, their music was different, and the world outside the doors was different, but they came to the same place for essentially the same reasons.

The Coronado makes that continuity unusually visible. Its elaborate decorations remain, its stars still shine overhead, and its auditorium continues to welcome audiences nearly a century after the first patrons walked through its doors.

There is also a deeper irony in the Coronado's reputation as a haunted building. The theater was created during an era when motion pictures themselves were still regarded as something approaching magic. Human beings who had been photographed years earlier could appear on a screen, moving and speaking long after the original moment had passed. Silent-film stars who had died could continue performing before audiences who had never known them in life.

Cinema, in other words, was already a technology for summoning ghosts.

The Coronado was built to house those apparitions. Its artificial stars and theatrical architecture provided an elaborate setting in which images of absent people could come temporarily back to life.

Perhaps the building was haunted from the beginning, just not in the way paranormal investigators imagine.

Today, the Coronado remains one of Rockford's most recognizable cultural landmarks. Its survival represents a rare victory for historic preservation in a city that has lost more than its share of remarkable old buildings. The theater continues to host concerts, theatrical productions, and community gatherings, while its history attracts visitors interested in architecture, entertainment, and the strange stories that accumulate around old places.

As the Coronado approaches its hundredth anniversary in 2027, the building carries nearly a century of Rockford's cultural memory within its walls. Some of that history is documented in photographs, newspaper accounts, architectural records, and the recollections of people who attended performances there. Other parts survive as stories whispered about empty balconies and mysterious figures in old-fashioned clothing.

The distinction matters, but both kinds of stories tell us something about the place.

Maybe the Lady in White is real. Maybe the man in the bowler hat is still wandering through the theater, looking for a performance that ended sometime during the Hoover administration. Maybe Willard Van Matre occasionally returns to inspect the magnificent building he gave his hometown.

Or maybe the Coronado is simply so beautiful, so theatrical, and so saturated with memory that we find it difficult to imagine everyone who ever loved the place has truly gone away.

Either way, the ghosts have chosen an excellent theater.

And if they happen to be sitting somewhere in the balcony when the lights go down and the stars come out, I hope they're enjoying the show.

Uncle Don's Terror Theater: When Rockford Had Its Own Horror Host

By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

There was a time when staying up late on a Saturday night in Rockford, Illinois, meant you might encounter something considerably stranger than anything happening downtown. If you turned your television to Channel 39 at 10:30 p.m. during the 1980s, you could find yourself in the company of a peculiar fellow named Uncle Don, a wisecracking shark named Sharky, and whatever assortment of vampires, giant monsters, mad scientists, and rubber-suited creatures the station had managed to dig out of its film library that week.

This was Uncle Don's Terror Theater, one of the more wonderfully eccentric chapters in Rockford television history. Long before streaming services made virtually every horror movie available on demand, local television stations provided their own peculiar gateways into the world of cinematic monstrosities. The movies were frequently terrible, the special effects were often worse, and the hosts sometimes seemed to have escaped from the institutions depicted in the films themselves. It was glorious.

Rockford's Uncle Don was actually Matt Swan, a television personality who presided over the festivities on WQRF-TV, Channel 39. His program followed in the grand American tradition of locally produced horror movie shows, a television phenomenon that flourished from the 1950s through the 1980s. Nearly every major television market had its own resident ghoul, vampire, mad scientist, or other questionable character introducing old horror movies and performing comedy routines between commercial breaks. Chicago viewers had Svengoolie. Los Angeles had Vampira and later Elvira. Rockford had Uncle Don.

And Uncle Don was a litlevision phenomenon that flourished from the 1950s through the 1980s. Nearly every major television market had its own resident ghoul, vampire, mad scientist, or other questionable character introducing old horror movies and performing comedy routines between commercial breaks. Chicago viewers had Svengoolie. Los Angeles had Vampira and later Elvira. Rockford had Uncle Don.

And Uncle Don was a little different.

Rather than dressing as a conventional monster, Swan played a strange, comical relative who seemed entirely comfortable inhabiting the low-rent universe of late-night horror television. One viewer, recalling the program years later on a classic horror film discussion board, described Uncle Don as resembling a weird relative living in a shabby basement with chicken wire over the windows. It's difficult to imagine a more appropriate setting for a man whose job involved introducing movies about radioactive monsters and reanimated corpses.

Uncle Don didn't work alone. His principal companion was Sharky, a sometimes whiny, wisecracking shark who served as a comic foil for the host's jokes and routines. Another recurring character was Uncle Don's nephew Ramsey, also portrayed by Matt Swan, who appeared to deliver viewer mail. The resulting atmosphere was something between a children's television program that had gone horribly wrong and a community theater production being staged in someone's basement.

The movies themselves represented a marvelous education in the history of cinematic horror. Viewers could encounter Universal's classic monsters in Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Invisible Man, and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Other evenings might bring Roger Corman's A Bucket of Blood, The Dunwich Horror, Count Yorga, The Food of the Gods, or one of the numerous Godzilla movies that introduced generations of American children to the pleasures of watching miniature cities get demolished by enormous rubber monsters.

There were also appearances by King Kong, Mighty Joe Young, The War of the Worlds, and adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories. The selection wasn't necessarily governed by critical reputation. In fact, some of the worst movies provided the best opportunities for Uncle Don to entertain his audience.

That was the secret of the local horror host. The movies were only part of the attraction. Sometimes the host was the main event.

In a 2013 reminiscence published on the blog My Decade, writer Chad Thorson recalled watching Uncle Don's Terror Theater with his brothers while growing up in DeKalb between 1985 and 1989. They would make microwave popcorn, tune in to Channel 39, and settle in for the evening's entertainment. What he remembered most fondly wasn't necessarily the films themselves but Uncle Don's comedy routines, Sharky's wisecracks, and the ridiculous interruptions that made even the least promising horror movie worth watching.

This is an important distinction. A movie that might have been nearly unbearable on its own could become an enjoyable communal experience when accompanied by a funny host who understood exactly how ridiculous the whole enterprise was. The audience wasn't simply watching a bad movie. It was participating in a shared joke.

There was something especially appealing about the local nature of these programs. Uncle Don wasn't a distant Hollywood celebrity appearing through some national broadcasting network. He was a character created and performed by someone working in the same northern Illinois television market as his viewers. The program belonged to Rockford and the surrounding communities in a way that nationally syndicated entertainment never quite could.

For children and teenagers growing up in the region, that connection mattered. There was a peculiar intimacy to watching someone from your own part of the world introducing movies that had already been circulating through American television for decades. The station might not have had much money, but it had imagination, and imagination was frequently more entertaining than expensive production values.

Rockford had an earlier tradition of horror programming as well. During the early 1970s, WREX Channel 13 broadcast Creatures from Dimension 13, a program remembered by local horror enthusiasts for its frightening movie selections and introductory narration. Unlike Uncle Don's show, Creatures from Dimension 13 apparently did not feature a regular on-camera horror host. Its atmosphere relied more heavily on the films and the eerie presentation surrounding them.

Uncle Don represented a different approach. He made the host himself an essential part of the entertainment.

As the years passed, the program evolved. The title was eventually shortened from Uncle Don's Terror Theater to Uncle Don's Theater, reflecting an expansion beyond strictly horror-oriented programming. Thorson remembered the show moving to Saturday afternoons during its final period and even presenting the television miniseries Shōgun. A program that had begun as a showcase for monsters and mayhem had developed into something broader, though its peculiar personality remained the attraction.

One remarkable artifact of this period survives in the form of a postcard featuring Uncle Don and Sharky, dated July 18, 1989. A collector posted an image of the card on Flickr in 2018, preserving a small piece of Rockford broadcasting history that might otherwise have disappeared. The accompanying description includes links to surviving video clips, allowing viewers to revisit a television personality who once entertained audiences across northern Illinois.

Unfortunately, much of the original material may be lost. In a 2010 account published on the World of the Weird Monster Blog, a fellow horror-show producer described discussions with Channel 39 about potentially bringing another horror program to the station. According to that account, flooding had destroyed much of the station's old movie library, including recordings of Uncle Don's Terror Theater. The claim deserves further archival investigation, but if accurate, it represents a substantial loss of regional television history.

The disappearance of local programming is one of the sad realities of television's earlier decades. Shows that occupied a regular place in thousands of people's lives were not always considered historically important enough to preserve. Videotapes were reused, archives were discarded, and productions that had entertained entire communities sometimes vanished almost completely.

Fortunately, not everything disappeared. Video recordings of Uncle Don's comedy segments have surfaced online, and the memories of viewers continue to circulate through blogs, social media, and discussions among horror movie enthusiasts. In 2015, Rockford radio station Q98.5 published a retrospective celebrating the program and identifying Matt Swan as the man behind the character. At that time, Swan was working as a communications instructor at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, a rather appropriate occupation for someone who had spent years teaching northern Illinois audiences how much fun could be extracted from a terrible horror movie.

The larger story of Uncle Don's Terror Theater is also the story of a disappearing form of regional entertainment. Local television once had room for unusual personalities and strange little programs that reflected the eccentricities of their communities. Not everything had to appeal to millions of viewers. Sometimes entertaining a few thousand people in Rockford, Belvidere, DeKalb, and the surrounding countryside was enough.

Today, we can summon practically any horror movie ever made with a few clicks. We can watch them at any hour, pause them whenever we please, and skip the commercials entirely. In many respects, this is a tremendous improvement. But something has been lost along the way.

There was a particular pleasure in waiting until Saturday night, turning on the television, and discovering what strange cinematic offering Uncle Don had prepared for his audience. You didn't choose from ten thousand titles. You watched whatever was on. If the movie was terrible, you laughed at it. If it was frightening, you enjoyed being frightened. And if Uncle Don and Sharky interrupted the proceedings to perform some ridiculous comedy routine, that was simply part of the evening's entertainment.

The imperfections were part of the charm. The cheap sets, the corny jokes, the grainy movies, and the unmistakable feeling that everyone involved was having a pretty good time created something that polished modern entertainment often struggles to reproduce.

A sense of place.

For a generation of northern Illinois horror fans, Uncle Don wasn't simply another television character. He was their horror host, broadcasting from their own corner of the world, inviting them into a strange little universe where bad movies were good entertainment and Saturday nights belonged to monsters.

Somewhere in the collective memory of Rockford, it's still 10:30 on a Saturday night. The popcorn is ready. Channel 39 is coming into focus. Sharky has something sarcastic to say.

And Uncle Don is about to introduce another terrible movie.

We wouldn't have it any other way.